The 'Real Presence' and the Church of England

Dr. Manning proceeds: “If it” (the Church of England) “recognizes an undefined Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Altar.” Those before us have pointed out, how the Church of England taught, not an “undefined,” but “a Real Objective Presence of Christ’s Blessed Body and Blood.” Take, e. g., the statement framed word by word on our Formularies, in a work which received the sanction of two of our then Archbishops, to whom it was, with permission, inscribed, and which used to be recommended to Candidates for Holy Orders.

“Taking as her immutable foundation the words of Jesus Christ—’This is My Body—This is My Blood of the New, Covenant, and, Whoso eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood, hath Eternal Life,’ she believes that the Body or Flesh, and the Blood of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, both God and Man, united indivisibly in one Person, are verily and indeed given, taken, eaten, and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper, under the outward sign or form of Bread and Wine, which is on this account the ‘Partaking or Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ.’ She believes, that the Eucharist is not the sign of an absent Body, and that those who partake of it receive not merely the figure, or shadow, or sign of Christ’s Body, but the reality itself. And as Christ’s Divine and Human Natures are inseparably united, so she believes that we receive in the Eucharist, not only the Flesh and Blood of Christ, but Christ Himself, both God and Man.”

With regard to the term “Transubstantiation,” there must be a real difference between the meaning which it had in the minds of the Schoolmen, and that which it must now have since the Catechism of the Council of Trent. For it is there taught with authority, that “the Eucharist has been called bread, because it has the appearance, and still retains the quality, natural to bread, of supporting and nourishing;” but the Schoolmen thought, that with the “change of substance” that power of nourishing ceased. Yet this being granted, I know not what can be included in our term “substance,” which the English Church affirms to remain, which is not also included in the Roman term “accidents,” which they also affirm to remain. Clearly the doctrine which the Church of England rejects under the term “Transubstantiation, or the change of the substance of bread and wine,” is only one which “overthroweth the nature of a sacrament,” in that the sign and the thing signified became the same. This was so, according to the doctrine of the Schoolmen, in which “substance” was equivalent to “matter.”